The Importance of Severing Connections
Learning to break bonds in our hyper-connected world.
The following is an excerpt from Gemma Steele’s article in the fourth edition of our print magazine, ‘Connection’. As our valued subscriber, you’re entitled to 10% off each edition when you enter the code ‘SUBSCRIBER10’ at checkout. Use this link to get your copy.
Connection is important, but in its shadow is the importance of cutting connections. I think our reluctance to cut connections comes from a place of fear. There is safety in familiarity.
This mindset is one that many know too well: it has imprisoned people in toxic relationships, mediocre jobs and disappointing social circles. We are so quick to synonymise comfort with adequacy because it is terrifying to think of what lies outside of it.
And, in this day and age, it’s more than insular anxieties too. When I realised that the modelling industry was toxic, I didn’t know who I’d be without it, but more importantly (for a millennial), I also didn’t know who other people would think I’d be without it. Both social and insular angst buried and muddied the potential benefit of cutting connections.
I had flirted with quitting modelling several times before it became final. I would tell my family and friends I was quitting; I would even sometimes get as far as telling my agents that I was quitting. But, within a few months, I’d have found a new agency and a new supply of denial to call upon. It was something concerningly akin to Stockholm Syndrome.
In the end, I quit with an Instagram post. In what is quite possibly the epitome of millennial existence, an Instagram post felt like the only way I could cleanly break the connection. I exposed and publicised every significant negative experience I’d had in the industry.
I detailed the times I was told I was too ‘big to model’, the times I was paid in ‘exposure’ rather than money, the times the amount of makeup plastered over my face gave me an allergic reaction, the times I was harassed or taken advantage of. It was scathing.
If I were a brave enough person, I wouldn’t need to publish a scornful Instagram post, but what I needed was to sever that connection; what I needed was for people to hold me accountable; what I needed was to make it so that I couldn’t go back.
In a lot of ways, I didn’t sever the connection, I just consciously made sure that no professional in the modelling industry would ever work with me again. I effectively passed the buck.
But despite what it might seem, at its core, breaking any connection is really about prioritising a different connection: a connection with oneself. The quality or method of how I broke my connection with modelling is almost entirely irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact I valued my well-being. More recently, I’ve spoken to people at the end of their working lives about severing connections that don’t serve them anymore.
The phrase ‘losing connection’ kept cropping up. These people could relate to the idea behind letting go in a similar way to me, and they too had dropped connections that no longer benefitted them; however, they hadn’t severed connections because they valued their self-worth, they had merely gotten to a point where they stopped caring.
They hadn’t severed connections; they had let them dissolve. It was less about righteousness and more about indifference. Suddenly, despite my fear of what lay ahead, I was pleased I had chosen to brazenly sever my negative connections rather than reaching a similar state of defeat.
As predicted, I didn’t know who I was without modelling. I felt uninteresting without it, and changing the way I saw my own body did not happen overnight. However, that absence of familiarity carried an unexpected freshness.
Not knowing wholly who you are gives you space to explore new corners of yourself. Blank canvases aren’t redundant; they are an untapped resource. With the connection to modelling gone, I found new colours to paint with, textures to revisit. For me, that colour was feminism, and that texture was getting back into writing.
While our experiences accumulate to make up our current character, severing my connection to modelling reminded me that we functioned just fine before every experience or person. It might have been a different way of functioning, but it was functioning all the same.
We are made up of the people we ignore and the experiences we avoid: the jobs we quit, the lessons we forget, the people we dislike, the schools we leave, the hobbies we give up. It is these acts of resistance and courage that put the being into ‘human being’.
There is beauty in connection, but there is bravery in breaking away from it.
